Get it Right!

In our discussions of airline customer service failures last year and the year before I noted that some carriers were apparently spending more time developing new and innovative ways to stonewall customer requests than they were in finding new ways to improve customer satisfaction with their services – or even with, you know, doing their jobs in the first place! Things like discontinuing the Customer Service telephone number and requiring people to put all complaints and request into mail or email, for example, or using a series of call centers to pass the customer from one operator to another for hours or days until they give up and go away. Decades of consumer behavior research confirms that this sort of thing was stupid to begin with, and is only getting worse…

In general, the data indicates that you can expect a happy customer to tell about four people how great your company was, while a disgruntled one will tell between twenty-five and thirty about how bad you are. That was bad enough a generation ago, when a single angry customer could offset the favorable impression created in seven or eight happy ones. But today, when anyone with Internet access can, at least in theory, tell somewhere over a billion people their troubles in a matter of minutes – or, at least, get 12,000,000 hits on a protest video in only a few weeks – any customer service failure as taken on far greater importance…

Consider, for example, the story that turned up on the NJ.com news aggregation site this week. Apparently a retired Army officer went to buy a new car, and on finding a model he liked was told that there was a small discount available to him because of his military service. He purchased the car and was quite satisfied with it until a notice arrived a few weeks later saying that his military discount had been denied by Corporate, and he would have to pay the dealership back the $500. No explanation was forthcoming, and even after he provided documentation to prove his status as a Veteran, the company continued to demand repayment and refuse to explain why. The customer turned to the consumer affairs reporter for the Star-Ledger, and the story eventually ran in the paper, the NJ.com news aggregation site, and from there onto FARK.com and dozens of obscure blogs like this one…

Now, this story isn’t exactly an atrocity; it’s not as if the company repossessed the man’s car, trashed his credit, or even prevented him from buying it in the first place. There is no law that required the company to provide a special discount to Veterans or anyone else, and no indication that the extra money made any difference in the customer’s ability to afford the car. In fact, it doesn’t appear from the online story that the customer even knew there was a possibility of a discount until the dealership people told him. All the company had to do was avoid having such a program in the first place, or failing that, provide an explanation of why they weren’t going to honor it in this case. But then, that’s exactly the point…

The same decades-old research indicates that the vast majority of customer service disputes (somewhere around 75-80% depending on various factors) can be resolved if addressed openly and directly; the number is even higher where credits or other monetary incentives can be used. And while companies have traditionally disputed whether the improvements in customer relations and public relations warranted the cost of such programs, I have to ask whether those calculations should be changed when millions of potential customers might end up reading about your decision…